[Tuckerdude]

Hello everyone!

I have eleven 1.5TB hard drives connected to a dedicated Windows box in a separate room (all shared). Right now the machine stays on 24/7 and is great because all of my media is available whenever I want it. But I'm conflicted as to whether or not to schedule automatic suspend of the machine which would in-turn, spin down all of the drives and give them a rest.

I have heard different opinions about the pros and cons of doing this but it seems to me that it would reduce wear and tear if they had a rest every once in a while (maybe bi-weekly).

So I thought I would send out the call to the fine folks here on this forum. Any opinions or past experience are welcome.

[sergiocos]

5 years of hard drives not sleeping and counting (3TB total). Not shutdowns, just restarts. I advice against it (sleeping hard-drives) if you download or (especially) seed files from that hard drives because the drive is stressed from time to time by these files (the drive is powered on/off so many times that this can't be good). The sound of a hard-drive spinning-down/up is kinda scary..
As log as the temperature isn't sky-high, as long as you don't perform copy/move files all day log, you should be fine. You don't save the planet, or a whale, or prevent global warming, but you should be fine.
My trick is this: if your hard-drive pass the guaranteed period, you should put some permanent data on it and put it on a shelter, use it only you need it. But if your hard drive is on a trial period, stress it as much as you can, no mercy .
This is my advices after using all brands, more than five yrs. There is no more reliable brands, just luck. I saw glorious brands failed, i own low-cost-brands that works after 7 yrs. My advice: if you use data on a daily basis, keep the hard drives plugged in as long as you want. If you don't, plug them when you need them

[mw90]

would like to add make sure you have backups and backups of backups, it is a real time and in some cases a life saver. i have 5tb of data that is backed up twice so in total i have 15 tb worth of harddrives. most of my media and my documents are on these so 2 backups is playing it safe